Plaques waving on King George Street, a mass demonstration: No To Slavery! And Destroy the Concentration Camp! and so on, an angry mass of humanity coming together to protest the perceived enslavement of those first, fragile Others in their locked-down networks, Matt Cohen’s laboratories under siege, his rag-tag team of scientists, kicked out from one country after another before settling, at long last, in Jerusalem—
St. Cohen of the Others, they called him now. Boris lifted the mug to his lips and discovered it was empty. He put it down, rubbed his eyes. He should have slept. He was no longer young, could not go days without sleep, powered by stimulants and restless, youthful energy. The days when he and Miriam hid on this very same roof, holding each other, making promises they knew, even then, they couldn’t keep…
He thought of her now, trying to catch a glimpse of her walking down Neve Sha’anan, the ancient paved pavilion of Central Station where she had her shebeen. It was hard to think of her, to ache like this, like a, like a boy. He had not come back because of her but, somewhere in the back of his mind, it must have been, the thought…
On his neck the aug breathed softly. He had picked it up in Tong Yun City, on Mars, in a back-street off Arafat Avenue, in a no-name clinic run by a third-generation Martian Chinese, a Mr. Wong, who installed it for him.
It was supposed to have been bred out of the fossilized remains of micro bacterial Martian life forms, but whether that was true no one knew for sure. It was strange having the aug. It was a parasite, it fed off of Boris, it pulsated gently against his neck, a part of him now, another appendage, feeding him alien thoughts, alien feelings, taking in turn Boris’ human perspective and subtly shifting it, it was like watching your ideas filtered through a kaleidoscope.
He put his hand against the aug and felt its warm, surprisingly-rough surface. It moved under his fingers, breathing gently. Sometimes the aug synthesized strange substances, they acted like drugs on Boris’ system, catching him by surprise. At other times it shifted visual perspective, or even interfaced with Boris’ node, the digital networking component of his brain, installed shortly after birth, without which one was worse than blind, worse than deaf, one was disconnected from the Conversation.
He had tried to run away, he knew. He had left home, had left Weiwei’s memory, or tried to, for a while. He went into Central Station, and he rode the elevators to the very top, and beyond. He had left the Earth, beyond orbit, gone to the Belt, and to Mars, but the memories followed him, Weiwei’s bridge, linking forever future and past…
“I wish my memory to live on, when I am gone.”
“So do all humans,” the Other said.
“I wish…” gathering courage, he continued. “I wish for my family to remember,” he said. “To learn from the past, to plan for the future. I wish my children to have my memories, and for their memories, in turn, to be passed on. I want my grandchildren and their grandchildren and onwards, down the ages, into the future, to remember this moment.”
“And so it shall be,” the Other said.
And so it was, Boris thought. The memory was clear in his mind, suspended like a dew drop, perfect and unchanged. Weiwei had gotten what he asked for, and his memories were Boris’ now, as were Vlad’s, as were his grandmother Yulia’s and his mother’s, and all the rest of them—cousins and nieces and uncles, nephews and aunts, all sharing the Chong family’s central reservoir of memory, each able to dip, instantaneously, into that deep pool of memories, into the ocean of the past.
Weiwei’s Bridge, as they still called it, in the family. It worked in strange ways, sometimes, even far away, when he was working in the birthing clinics on Ceres, or walking down an avenue in Tong Yun City, on Mars, a sudden memory would form in his head, a new memory—Cousin Oksana’s memories of giving birth for the first time, to little Yan—pain and joy mixing in with random thoughts, wondering if anyone had fed the dog, the doctor’s voice saying, “Push! Push!”, the smell of sweat the beeping of monitors, the low chatter of people outside the door, and that indescribable feeling as the baby slowly emerged out of her…
He put down the mug. Down below Central Station was awake now, the neighborhood stalls set with fresh produce, the market alive with sounds, the smell of smoke and chickens roasting slowly on a grill, the shouts of children as they went to school—
He thought of Miriam. Mama Jones, they called her now. Her father was Nigerian, her mother from the Philippines, and they had loved each other, when the world was young, loved in the Hebrew that was their childhood tongue, but were separated, not by flood or war but simply life, and the things it did to people. Boris worked the birthing clinics of Central Station, but there were too many memories here, memories like ghosts, and at last he rebelled, and gone into Central Station and up, and onto an RLV that took him to orbit, to the place they called Gateway, and from there, first, to Lunar Port.
He was young, he had wanted adventure. He had tried to get away. Lunar Port, Ceres, Tong Yun… but the memories pursued him, and worst amongst them were his father’s. They followed him through the chatter of the Conversation, compressed memories bouncing from one Mirror to the other, across space, at the speed of light, and so they remembered him here on Earth just as he remembered them there, and at last the weight of it became such that he returned.
He had been back in Lunar Port when it happened. He had been brushing his teeth, watching his face—not young, not old, a common enough face, the eyes Chinese, the facial features Slavic, his hair thinning a little—when the memory attacked him, suffused him—he dropped the toothbrush.
Not his father’s memory, his nephew’s, Yan: Vlad sitting in the chair, in his apartment, his father older than Boris remembered, thinner, and something that hurt him obscurely, that reached across space and made his chest tighten with pain—that clouded look in his father’s eyes. Vlad sat without speaking, without acknowledging his nephew or the rest of them, who had come to visit him.
He sat there and his hands moved through the air, arranging and rearranging objects none could see.
“Boris!”
“Yan.”
His nephew’s shy smile. “I didn’t think you were real.”
Time-delay, moon-to-Earth round-trip, node-to-node. “You’ve grown.”
“Yes, well…”
Yan worked inside Central Station. A lab on Level Five where they manufactured viral ads, airborne microscopic agents that transferred themselves from person to person, thriving in a closed-environment, air-conditioned system like Central Station, coded to deliver person-specific offers, organics interfacing with nodal equipment, all to shoutBuy. Buy. Buy.
“It’s your father.”
“What happened?”
“We don’t know.”
That admission must have hurt Yan. Boris waited, silence eating bandwidth, silence on an Earth-moon return trip.
“Did you take him to the doctors?”
“You know we did.”
“And?”